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...living things have a will that inanimate things do not possess. This will is somehow connected to but not solely attached to the spacetime coordinate system of daily living in which thermodynamic events occur. The denial of this reality is what hallmarks God deniers, as they seek to establish a hard and fast rule that there is no thing beyond this realm in which they can measure thermodynamic events.

Yep. These dudes really have got themselves trapped into a truth-suffocating intellectual box of their own making. Good luck to them, this class of highly-educated moral morons who, because they consider themselves the "brights," are just "naturally determined," on Darwinian grounds I imagine, to rule the rest of us, whom they call the "dims".

[At least as Richard Dwkins and Daniel Dennett imagine it, in their "hands-across-the Pond" assault on Christianity.... This is a public fact.]

The hard and fast box into which these moral morons have gotten themselves entrapped is the idea that only those events in Reality that can be directly observed and measured count as "real."

The next step is to say that entities subject to the second law of thermodynamics definitely qualify as "real" — because they are measurable in terms of observable thermodynamic effects. [Talk about "circular reasoning!"]

Well, if all you want to do is explore the problems of "heat death," then have a good time with such intellectual prescriptive offerings!!!

What does anything of this have to do with the question: "What is Life?" Isn't that supposed to be the main inquiry of the biological sciences? Or am I just a naive person?

The classical term for a thinker committed to this reductive propensity of thought is idiotes [Cicero]; or nabal [Hebrew scripture]. "Nabal" translates as: "The man who says in his heart, 'There is no God.'" In Cicero, idiotes translates as: The man who refuses to apperceive Reality: He is the man who embodies the character of aspernatio rationalis, of "contemptuous disdain for reason."

Nowadays, practically no one understands such insights, nor the concerns for personal and social order that they implicate.

Anyhoot and whatever. I do believe you are entirely correct in thinking that there is a companion coordinate system engaging the three-of-space-and-one-of-time dimensional model which enjoys so much currency in contemporary science. Notwithstanding the revolutions of relativity and quantum theory of the past century. Whatever these theories proposed, their import apparently is still largely undigested by the biological scientific community at large nowadays.

But I do believe you show a "direction" into which the scientific community might move to break the shackles of reductionism, and actually "get somewhere" in the real, that is to say truthful, understanding of the natural world....

Thank you ever so much, dear brother in Christ, for sharing your wonderful, thought-provoking insights!!!

If the most recent work in zero point field is any indication, we have an example of a ‘smaller’ coordinate system which is impinged/in reaction with/by our coordinate system. Actual Physicist calculations are now indicating that inertia and (therefore) gravity arise from the ‘effects’ of the zero point field which fills the entire Universe at sub-sub-atomic level. Could it be that energy is the result of the zero point coordinate system impinging a greater coordinate system in which our reality arises? It is looking more and more like that is in fact what reality is all about. And then we have the greater coordinate system of the spirit and the scenes of Jesus interacting across that coordinate system from our coordinate system. ... But I’m an old man ...

Thank you so much for your wonderful insights, dearest sister in Christ!

What does anything of this have to do with the question: "What is Life?" Isn't that supposed to be the main inquiry of the biological sciences? Or am I just a naive person?

Indeed, one would think that Biologists would be keenly interested in knowing the answer to that question. But they show little interest, though it is of great importance to the mathematicians and physicists who have been brought to the Biology table (Pattee, Rocha, Yockey, Rosen, et al)

The question you and I so often posed on this forum was "What is the difference between life and non-life/death in nature." Strangely, the correspondents could easily list what life looks like but not what life "is."

I'm sure you'll remember the thought experiments. Take an amoeba and try to figure out what it "is" - but to do this, one must kill it. Obviously, the whole was greater than the sum of the parts.

Likewise we discussed breaking down an imaginary rabbit. At some point of doing this to the ill fated imaginary rabbit, it was no longer alive and yet our correspondents were unable to define what was removed that the made the difference between life and death.

Ultimately we gravitated to Shannon (father of information theory) and his definition of information, i.e. information is the reduction of uncertainty in the receiver or molecular machine as it moves from a before state to an after state. It is the communication itself, the action, not the message.

When an autonomous thing "in" nature is successfully communicating (information) it is alive - if it no longer does or never could, it is not alive.

Indeed, the polio virus being created in a lab using the information content off the internet (post 158) stands as evidence. They obtained the message - RNA - and used materials to communicate that message. Voila - polio!